I've seen the knipmes and the damage done

You know what I’m talking about. Just thinking about it is making your palms sweaty. Your mouth starts watering like the Pavlovian dog that you are. You need some of the good stuff, and you need it now. Just one, man, just one, and you’ll be OK, but somewhere inside you you know that you won’t, cos one is too many, and a thousand is not enough. The brown bitch has got you in her claws, and she’s just playing with you, watching your almost endearing attempts to resist her, your new year’s resolutions evaporating under her spell, your half-hearted attempts to “throw it all away” and be done with it for ever and ever, but she knows one day not too long from now you’ll find yourself on your knees, scraping slivers of the good stuff off the floor and desperately stuffing it into your mouth.

I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve wrestled the brown bitch. I chased the dragon. And now the dragon’s chasing me. I’m not proud of it.

Because of my habit, I’ve lived a nightmare of stomach pains, high blood pressure, financial difficulties, public humiliation, problem relationships, and, of course, typecasting. I’ve basically been thirsty for the last fifteen years. I’ve lied to friends and family. I’ve inflicted many wounds on my thumbs and fingers. And the worst of it all is, when I think now of all I’ve lost, it makes me just want to cut myself a few slices and stuff them in my mouth. Hell, I want to finish a whole kilo. That’s what it’s come to. That’s the reality. That’s my life.

I guess my problem started back in primary school. My dad would buy a kg or so before a rugby match on Saturdays and I would chew away at the stuff, hardly noticing when a try was scored or even when the final whistle blew. Innocent enough it seems now. If only I could see then what I see now. Blame the media, blame the sexy advertising, blame the socio-economic conditions in higher middle-class white suburbs, it doesn’t matter. I must take the responsibility. I must admit that I am powerless against it.

When did I realise I have a problem? Would you be surprised if I told you as recent as two months ago? Would you believe me? That’s right. Two months. I’d been living among you as a biltong addict, incognito, as regular as All-Bran. Look around you. Your wife, son, lover, grandmother. Do they slip out to “the bathroom” every now and again? Drinking water every fifteen minutes? Picking at their teeth? They could be a functioning biltong addict. And you wouldn’t even know.

I finally realised I had a problem when I was on my way back from South Africa to Poland recently. I had at least 2kg of the stuff in my possession. Of course I had to take it with me — but how? How much could I take legally? First I tried the naive, law-abiding route. Which led to the naive, law-abiding experience — waiting hours on the phone to discover that the people enforcing the rules don’t know too much about them. After many many minutes of nothing which Cell C magically converted into money, my best answer was “probably none”. It was in this desperate moment that I saw what I had become.

I was receiving the final “not sure” answer, after waiting another fifteen minutes on the phone (we don’t realise how much stress we carry over because we no longer have actual, old-school landline phones to slam down in the ears of bureaucrats), and in this moment of frustration, an excess of energy flowed into my cerebrum. This excess was transformed into a vision, a solution, a revelation (or, as this combination is more generally known, a “scheme”).

The vision was of myself, naked (well, not quite, unless you want to imagine it that way), strapping long fillets of biltong to my waist, my chest, my legs, my arms. Putting on a clean, “I-have-a-BMW-and-a-gym-card-and-too-much-to-risk-so-don’t-even-bother-to-search-me” shirt, nodding at myself in the mirror, and casually walking through the security checkpoint, carefully taking off my belt and any metal objects I might have on my person before passing through the metal detector.

My beloved steel-capped boots have often had me called over by airport security for a quick touchy-feely. As a result I’ve studied security operations at airports carefully. And I knew the only way they could catch me would be if I let the bells go off. Dogs they usually saved for sniffing the bags. Sure, occasionally they would bring them out. But when you’re living a lie, this is the sort of gamble you’re willing to take.

It could have worked. But what if it didn’t? What if, by some unfortunate turn of events, I got caught? I mean, getting caught with heroin, or marijuana, that’s OK. There’s a social precedent. It’s a standard procedure of shame. But the idea of being caught with biltong taped to my body presented a level of social awkwardness way beyond my meagre capacities. And so I decided against it. I told a friend about the idea though. Watching the expression on her face, I realised that I was addicted.

So. Step one. Realise that I have a problem. Admit it. My life has become unmanageable. I am powerless over my addiction. Done. And it seems so easy to kick it. When you leave all those old friends behind, sure. You avoid the street the butcher is on. In Poland, the stuff is very hard to come by in any case, which makes it easy to stay away from temptation.

And then you get invited to a party at the embassy. And you know it’s going to be there. You know what’s going to happen. You know you’ll hold out for an hour, and then surrender to her. But like watching an aeroplane flying into the building, you can’t do anything. A passenger in your own life.

You wake up and it’s three weeks later. Of course it happened. And of course, you’re on your knees again. This time not scratching for a last sliver of the stuff. No, this time it’s far worse. You have embraced the ex-pat stereotype. You have stolen fire from the gods. You have built a biltong maker.

You call it “celebrating your heritage’. Like all Afrikaners unsure how to do this, you google it. You find a design. Simple enough. You build the thing. You buy the meat. You salt it, spice it, hang it up. You turn on the fan. It emits a gentle, soothing hum in your wardrobe, which now smells of coriander and raw meat. You tell yourself you’ll just make a few fillets. Just to see if you can do it. You check it every five minutes, as if somehow the moment of perfection, when biltong becomes what God intended it to be, would have magically ticked by. You show it to your students, a proud African delicacy. One of them sees the emperor’s willy, which in this case is a piece of dead, raw animal. She says it’s disgusting, and she’s right. But that’s fine. It’s just more for you. And now, there’s always more.

And you keep walking, down that lonely, thirsty road which can only end in one place. The biltong maker is humming in your wardrobe, and as you type these words, it calls to you. Just one more. Just. One. More.